Cool air blasted through the cavernous building in a remote field outside Felda, a tiny hamlet nine miles from Immokalee. Lopez and 70 other workers, mostly Mexican and Central American women, stood in rows packing vegetables picked from Southwest Florida's acres of verdant farms.
Lopez, a short, soft-spoken woman with fine black hair pulled back tightly above sparkling almond-shaped eyes, had always wanted a job like this. She had been two months pregnant when she fled her native Chiapas, Mexico, and had braved a harrowing four-day trek through the Sonoran Desert in search of a better life for her unborn child. In Florida, she had spent eight years following the crops, toiling in strawberry and tomato fields beneath blazing skies.
This job seemed different: indoors, stable, year-round work. Her daughter could even stay put in the same school. Yet in the two short weeks she had been at Moreno Farms, her unease had steadily grown. It had begun with the comments. The foreman, a gruff Mexican named Javier Garcia -- whom everyone called "Rubio" for his shock of light hair -- started the very first day: "You're so sexy," he would say in Spanish, standing close behind her as she packed vegetables. "Why not sleep with me?"
Like most migrant women in American agriculture, Lopez was used to chauvinist bosses making unwelcome advances. But something was different at Moreno Farms. She had already heard whispers about Garcia and the two brothers from Miami who ran the plant with absolute authority. Omar and Oscar Moreno, the other women warned, were also very bad men.
So when Lopez suddenly heard Omar calling her name above the packing line cacophony that morning in November 2011, she suppressed a shudder.
He pointed outside the packing house and said he had a special job for her. She followed him reluctantly, out into the humidity, around the back to a trailer he used as an office. As she walked toward the door, someone grabbed her hands.
Before she could do more than gasp and glimpse Garcia towering behind her, the foreman dragged her into the empty trailer. He blocked the exit and tore off her clothes. Then he raped her for half an hour. "This won't take much longer," he whispered to her at one point. "Let me release my milk."
When he was finished, Garcia told her to return to work.
"It took me half an hour just to compose myself," says the now-44-year old Lopez, who has recounted the details of her rape to federal and state authorities. "I just stayed in the back for half an hour. I couldn't come out."
Four years later, three women including Lopez have now testified on the record that either the Moreno brothers or Garcia raped them at the plant; two others say one of the bosses tried. All the women are certain many other Moreno Farms victims haven't yet spoken up. The case exemplifies an insidious problem for the tens of thousands of female migrant workers who are the backbone of Florida's $100 billion agriculture industry. For myriad reasons -- their immigration status, their isolation from family, their ignorance of local laws -- they're disproportionately victims of harassment, attacks, and rape.
"These assaults have almost become an accepted condition of working in the fields for a lot of women," says Robert E. Weisberg, regional attorney for the Miami office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
But Moreno Farms is the worst case of mass workplace rape documented in Florida's recent history -- and one of the worst in the history of American agriculture, say attorneys and advocates. Not only were multiple women raped, but also when three victims went to local sheriffs, they were quickly dismissed. No charges were ever filed.
Even worse, when federal authorities finally zeroed in on Moreno Farms and confirmed the attacks, the perpetrators quickly disappeared. The packing plant was shuttered. The farm's owner -- Oscar B. Moreno, father of the brothers who ran the place -- has ignored multiple federal and state legal summons since last summer.
"I have no idea where he is at this point," says Peter Hockman, the farm's registered agent and former attorney. Another lawyer -- Carlos Salup of Coral Gables -- who represents the farm in an ongoing civil case, declined to comment or put New Times in touch with the farm's owner. A letter delivered to a Homestead farm registered to Oscar B. Moreno also went unanswered; the farm has a For Sale sign on the fence and appears abandoned. The last address registered to Moreno Farms, meanwhile, a warehouse in Kendall, is occupied by another business and has no forwarding address for Moreno.
The women's stories of rape and assault with impunity -- told in full for the first time through interviews with two victims and hundreds of pages of court records and police documents -- paint a vivid picture of the terror migrant women can face in Florida's fields.
"The fact is that we have three documented rapes, and we also know this was happening to [other] women here," says Victoria Mesa, the victims' attorney. "Yet there are no criminal charges. It's terrible."
Olivia Tamayo was taking a break in a tomato field in Southern California's scorching Central Valley when her supervisor pulled her away from the group. He drove her to a remote almond orchard and flashed a handgun.
That rape was the first of three sexual assaults by the supervisor, Tamayo later testified in court. And when she complained to her bosses at Harris Farms, a huge multinational grower, they retaliated against her rather than punish the supervisor, she claimed. Prosecutors, meanwhile, never charged anyone with a crime.
Tamayo's tale is all too familiar to female farm workers, but it became a landmark. In 2002, the federal government sued Harris, and three years later, the company was forced to pay an $800,000 penalty. (The firm remains adamant to this day that nothing untoward happened.) It was among the first recent sexual assault claims pursued by the federal government against a corporate farm.
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